scholarly journals Agents of May Fourth. Jing Yinyu, Xu Zhongnian, and the Early Introduction of Modern Chinese Literature in France

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Magagnin
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Early Introduction ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Ideological Stance ◽  
May Fourth

Jing Yinyu (1901-1931?) and Xu Zhongnian (1904-1981) played a pivotal role in the dissemination of modern Chinese literature in France at the turn of the 1930s. Best known as Lu Xun’s first translator into a Western language and a friend of Romain Rolland’s, Jing compiled the Anthologie des conteurs chinois modernes in 1929. In his Anthologie de la littérature chinoise. Des origines à nos jours, published in 1932, Xu also devoted a section to recent literary developments. By analyzing the nature of the two projects, the translated corpora, and their paratexts, I will describe the features of Jing’s and Xu’s dissemination of May Fourth literature in France and scrutinize their artistic and ideological stance vis-à-vis the new literary scene. Ultimately, I will attempt to pinpoint in what terms the two scholars-cum-translators’ agency contributed to foreign readers’ awareness of the cultural, social and political experience of the May Fourth Movement.

Communist War Stories

1963 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 139-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Chi
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Conscious Effort ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
War Stories

Modern Chinese literature, which I date from the deliberate new beginnings made at the time of the May Fourth movement, is distinguished by its conscious effort at Europeanisation, which is in itself a catchall term embracing a whole assembly of themes and techniques, images and linguistic features taken and adopted from the vast literature beyond the seas and vaguely and often incorrectly designated as European. To be European was in fact simply to be non-traditional Chinese.

Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era

1978 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Howard Goldblatt ◽  
Merle Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
May Fourth

Wellspring of Inspiration: TheMandarin Union Versionand Modern Chinese Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-177
Author(s):  
JOHN T. P. LAI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Chinese Poetry ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
May Fourth

Coinciding with the May Fourth new cultural and literary movement, the publication of theMandarin Union Version, the vernacular Chinese translation of the Bible, in 1919 had a profound impact on the formation of modern Chinese literature. This paper examines the ways in which theUnion Versionprovided a novel source of imageries, poetic genres and worldviews for the experimentation of modern Chinese poetry during the Republican period, particularly between the 1920s and 1940s. Revering the Bible as the Holy Scripture, young Christian poetess Bing Xin (1900–99) spontaneously expressed her religious sentiments and commitment by composing a series of “sacred poems” as her own poetic response to the striking beauty of biblical images. Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), a renowned May Fourth Chinese writer and intellectual, regarded the Bible as a treasured anthology of Jewish literature and appreciated the humanistic values embodied in the teachings of Jesus. Placing the biblical references of the wilderness, Jesus's universal love and Moses's legalistic position in the forefront, Zhou Zuoren's poem“Qilu,”or “Crossroads,” captured the perplexity of his contemporary intellectuals, Zhou himself included, in their sabbathless search for cultural rejuvenation and national salvation during the transitional and tumultuous Republican era. An ardent admirer of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Chinese modernist poet Mu Dan (1918–77) studied their poetry at the Southwest United University in Kunming during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Imbued with biblical allusions, for instance, the fall of humankind and the loss of paradise, Mu Dan's poems, like“She de youhuo,”or “The Temptation of the Serpent,” articulate his penetrating critique of modernity. These works of poetry represent the multiple voices and diverse reactions of the early twentieth-century Chinese poets towards theUnion Versionwhich had not only firmly established its canonical status as the predominant Chinese translation of the Bible used by the Protestant Church, but also emerged as a literary tour-de-force to propel the evolution of modern Chinese poetry.

Learning to Read Lu Xun, 1918–1923: The Emergence of a Readership

2002 ◽  
Vol 172 ◽  
pp. 1042-1064 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Shan Chou
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
Fourth Generation ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
The Creation ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
New Literature

As the first and still the most prominent writer in modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881–1936) had been the object of extensive attention since well before his death. Little noticed, however, is the anomaly that almost nothing was written about Lu Xun in the first five years of his writing career – only eleven items date from the years 1918–23. This article proposes that the five-year lag shows that time was required to learn to read his fiction, a task that necessitated interpretation by insiders, and that further time was required for the creation of a literary world that would respond in the form of published comments. Such an account of the development of his standing has larger applicability to issues relating to the emergence of a modern readership for the New Literature of the May Fourth generation, and it draws attention to the earliest years of that literature. Lu Xun's case represents the earliest instance of a fast-evolving relationship being created between writers and their society in those years.

Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan See Kam
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Modern Chinese Literature ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Literature Reading ◽  
Romance Fiction ◽  
Peking Opera ◽  
Sentimental Romance ◽  
Narrative Images

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction (yuanyang hudie) - which emerged when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle. This “fiction of comfort” came under attack by the May Fourth Movement after 1919, and was eventually consigned to the margins of modern Chinese literature. Reading through the lens of “three-women” films like Fate in Tears and Laughters (1932), Three Modern Girls (1933), Sun Moon Star (1960), and The Story of Three Loves (1963), and their women-centered narratives, enables a reading of Peking Opera Blues which reveals some of the ways in which Tsui Hark is able to emphasize the idea of women as narrative images; to highlight female agencies and subjectivities and to explore the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and post patriarchal consumerist society of Hong Kong.

Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth Century China. By Yomi Braester. [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 264+xii pp. ISBN 0-8047-4792-X.]

2004 ◽  
Vol 179 ◽  
pp. 813-815
Author(s):  
Chris Berry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
May Fourth Movement ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Modern Chinese ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
The May Fourth Movement

Do not be fooled by the modest, precise, and careful tone of Yomi Braester's prose. In Witness Against History, he makes a powerful contribution to the transformation of scholarship on modern Chinese culture. In recent years, scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and David Der-wei Wang have argued that the focus on the May Fourth movement has been too singular, obscuring important schools and authors that do not fit that agenda. Braester takes this argument home to May Fourth culture and its inheritors in literature and film. This work has been assumed to uphold the standard of modernity as nationalism, realism, rationalism, and humanism. This makes it part of a larger reform or revolution effort to reinsert China into “history,” understood as Hegelian progress. Braester understands the shock of the modern new as trauma, and this is reflected in all the works he has chosen.

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